In the middle of the fourteenth century Sir John Mandeville, travelling through Macedonia, came across the grave of Aristotle. In a place called Strages, he writes, ‘there is an altar upon his tomb, and there they make solemn feast ilk a year, as he were a saint. And upon his altar they hold their great counsel and assembly; and they trow that, through inspiration of God and him, they shall have the better counsel’.
In the thirteenth century the tomb of Plato was said to exist in a church at Konia in Asia Minor. There was a spring and a river of Plato nearby, for it was believed that ‘the plain of Konia was once a sea, which Plato caused to disappear’. In the chapel of the Panagia Portaitissa in the monastery of Iviron on Mount Athos one may still see among the rows of saints and prophets painted on the walls the figures of Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, and even Thucydides. At the lowest level of enlightenment in the Byzantine world the ancient philosophers were revered as magicians or prophets. But among educated people Plato and Aristotle were universally admired for their literary merits, if for no other reason. It was they who, in their differing ways, had set the style and standard of literacy for all Greek Christian writers, philosophers, and theologians.